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May 30, 2010

I'm looking at the front page (on account of the fact that I have visitors coming from Astro Toy now) and it doesn't exactly lead with a ton of anime content. As such, and considering my current writing backlog (which is all WRITE ANIME ARTICLE FOR COLONY DROP) I want to inform new readers and remind the rest of you that I write for Colony Drop, which I'm informed is the favorite anime blog of various Anime Community Cool Kids. You should slavishly follow their example and read the site! I post as "Dave" on there, I did the bulk of our Spring '10 posts, and if I ever get this damned backlog under control you're going to be seeing a lot on there from me shortly. Be aware.

Also, to the readers coming from Astro Toy, welcome! I think this is a pretty good blog. I've been running it for a few years, so the archive runs deep. By all means, go back and have a look. The content isn't exactly focused-- I love robots, anime for old guys and little girls, and weird niche videogames-- but I guess that's why I tag it. Hope you enjoy yourselves!

May 18, 2010

Well then, since we're on the subject of under-the-radar videogames, I give you Ancient's superb 8-bit throwback piece Protect Me Knight.

Here's the setup: there's a princess in the middle of the screen waving happily at the player. You and the princess (and up to three other players) are surrounded by dinky wooden barricades, and past the barricades is an invading horde of goblins, succubi, ghosts, dragons, lizardmen and what-have-you. Your party's job is to kill all the monsters before they make it to the princess, in equal measures beating the hell out of them and building barricades and catapults to impede their progress. Depending on how you do, you'll get "love points" from the princess that you can spend on upgrades. There's a lot of the tower defense subgenre in here, but it's more an action game than a strategy game in practice.

There are four distinct characters that actually play completely differently: slow-and-strong Fighter, fire-spitting Mage, boomerang-flinging Amazon, and trap-laying Ninja. Upon first impressions, the Amazon's the strongest: I barely even have to build towers with her boomerangs flying around the screen killing everything for me as I do my rounds. No matter what you do, though, the game absolutely floods the screen with enemies. This will not be easy.

Like Megaman 9/10, this is a "modern retro game", deliberately fashioned after the NES games of old. This trend is starting to get played out, but rest assured that this is no faux-retro BS. Ancient knows how to do this. This is a small game (about 40 minutes, continues are allowed, but no saving) with great depth and replayability: the best of what they made back in the day. These guys are absolutely committed to the look, the feel, and most importantly the atmosphere of the NES game. Just wait until you get to the beautiful 80s ending sequence.

Ancient knows how to modern retro it so well that the game is translated into just the right flavor of awkward 80's Japanese videogame English. It's not completely unintelligible like All Your Base, but it's pretty serious stuff, with gems like "TAKE CARE UGLY AIRSHIP. IT GIVES YOU A LOT OF
MONSTERS." Make sure to wait at the title screen to read the character biographies.

The finishing touch is Ancient's incredible "English box art", which perfectly captures the kind of box a small Japanese company like Culture Brain or Toei's videogame division would regularly thrust upon kids back in the day. The game description on the back is romanized Japanese, and I quote: "Protect Me Knight ha Princess wo tekikara Protect suru game death."

If this game were on Live Arcade or PSN, it would be big. Unfortunately for Ancient, it is on the Xbox Live Indie Games service, which lacks online multiplayer. (It also lacks an English listing: it will be a pain in the ass trying to find it through your Xbox, so use the link at the beginning of this post and let it auto-download.) Being able to play with three other people wherever, whenever would make this a killer app-- and I'll take this over Castle Crashers any damn day. As it is, I guess I'll have to have a Protect Me Night at my place sometime, or at the very least talk a friend into it. Bring your 360 pads and a couple six packs, guys, we're making a party out of this.

(If you're not sold yet or you don't have a 360, you poor bastard, check out the PC version demo by clicking the big floppy disc on the Japanese-language website.)

I've been kind of buried in cheap, good videogames for the past month or so, and playing all this Super Street Fighter IV means I'm not writing them up like I should be. In case I never get to them, you should go ahead and buy Protect Me Knight and Afterburner Climax right now. What I really wanted to dig into was something you're even less likely to hear about than those two: a pinball compilation.

When was the last time you even saw a pinball machine? All through my 90's youth, pinball was the constant mechanical companion of the arcade videogame. They cost an extra quarter, but their flash, their gimmicks, and the feeling of knocking around something that actually existed made up for all that. Today, on the other hand, pinball has been the first casualty of the slow
death of the arcade. Expensive, huge, high-maintenance and unprofitable, pinballs had to vacate even the Dave and Busters of the world, to say nothing of the remaining fringe places that only survive on the continued patronage of extreme fighting/music genre fans.

Aside from the Break, I only see pinball in bars anymore. Some hipster dive my buddy took me to had bought a very recent pinball machine: I think it was Batman. It was brand new, in any case-- the table was clear of any wear and played beautifully-- but the outside of the machine had been completely all-over jacked up. It looked so deliberate and fake that I figure the management did it to make the machine fit with the decor. This is why even hipsters hate hipsters.

Today, pinball limps along like that, scratched up and painted over in bars. Stern's the only pinball company left, and they sell them where they can. Even so, just like how SNK was still producing Neo-Geo games years after the platform had faded out of relevance for the average player, pinball has basically disappeared from the pop cultural radar. There's a lot of good stuff in there, and it will be sad to see the phenomenon disappear entirely.

This is where preservation comes in. I just picked up Pinball Hall of Fame: Williams Collection for my 360 and at its bargain basement price, the game is a hell of a deal. There are a lot of classic videogame collections available out there, but owing to the tiny pinball fanbase and the difficulty of giving it the same treatment, we can't really say the same for pinball. Hall of Fame is that treatment: it's a package of some of the most highly regarded tables by one of the great manufacturers, simulated with as much love as a budget developer can afford.

You've got your choice of thirteen tables from throughout Williams' history, ranging from vintage to modern (as in '97: Williams quit on pinball and moved into casinos years ago). It's a testament to how good these games are that even the 70s stuff holds up as well as the stuff from the late 90s, fancy video and effects be damned. Every single one of these machines absolutely bleeds personality: the game design, the table art, the atmosphere. Gorgar is Williams' first voiced machine, for example: the titular demon can only speak seven words, forming simple phrases like "I-- GOT-- YOU" and "YOU-- BEAT-- ME". There's no music, only a blipping (like Asteroids) that we're told is the heartbeat of the beast, going faster as the stakes get higher. From Gorgar's minimalist audio to the elaborate dot-matrix animations that would follow, these guys did a lot with a little.

The tables hide some very complex scoring systems which tend to revolve around hitting all of X targets, or making such and such shots in succession to start up some mode in which you can score a lot of points. The game has set up an achievement system to this end, where you learn the table by aiming for specific goals as you play. Figuring out how these tables work provides a lot of the fun, but the game also provides extremely helpful instructions for each table that point out exactly how everything works. This includes a lot of tricks you won't figure out on your own, especially on the really ambitious tables like No Good Gofers. At first repulsive-- the lead characters of Gofers clearly come from the 90's "animal mascots with attitude" phase that gave us Bubsy the Bobcat and various other unbearable little shits-- it turns out to be one of the most unique, and certainly the most complex, of the tables.

With the possible exception of Jive Time, the relic you have to unlock by playing the game's marathon mode, every single one of these tables is extremely playable. They are all beloved tables (particularly Medieval Madness, which appears to be the Radiant Silvergun of pinballs, selling for $6,000 on hype that far exceeds the high quality of the game) and they're here for a reason. You can put a ton of time into any one of them. They're tough, but they're not unfair, and once you start really racking up the points, you start to feel seriously accomplished. The great thing about pinball is even if you only do okay, it makes you feel awesome about it. When you really get good, well... that's why they call them "pinball wizards".

The only drawback here is the weak interface: the novelty of navigating a 3D game room wears off quickly, particularly when you realize you have no alternative, and God help you if you're trying to read the online leaderboards. There are also a couple of problems in the simulations (like the shot on Arabian Nights which is, for some reason, nearly impossible to get), and one time I was actually able to crash Pin-bot. That's about the worst of it, and, well, this is a budget game.

You can probably find it for fifteen bucks, if that, and given the amount of content it's a steal above even the average bargain bin game. Highly recommended for anybody who's ever liked pinball. Don't settle for the downloadable Pinball FX/Zen Pinball, this puts it to shame. I'd love to see a Bally collection, but that's probably never gonna happen. I'll take what I can get.

May 16, 2010

Before we talk about a videogame, I will talk to you about my last trip to Book-Off. It was kind of a bummer, and I want you to suffer with me.

There was an Urusei Yatsura box set for thirteen dollars.

Boy, oh boy, did I ever bring that lightly damaged, heavily discounted box set to the counter. And they looked at my $1 Playstation games and said okay, but then they looked at my $13 Urusei Yatsura box set. And they took that box back, real quick, and they whispered to each other all "eeeeeh?!" and "thirteen bucks?!"

The clerk came back and said "that'll be $30". $30 is a steal for any one of those boxes, but I didn't do it. They're probably still there if you go: go ahead, I can't afford 'em and I know it. (Need an employee? EMPLOY DAVE TODAY)

So, as was foreshadowed by this sad tale, today's topic is "Anime-licensed Playstation games".

May 15, 2010

The Japanese circle that contacted me about writing for a fanzine has completed their book, and if you're reading this they've formally announced the details. Congratulations, guys: I'm glad I could take part in it.

Animerca (not Animerica) is not the kind of doujinshi you probably have in mind: it's a book of critical articles. I'm part of a section of the book written by foreign fans and
translated into Japanese by the circle in the interest of cultural exchange. My piece is an introduction to the current state of the American anime convention, specifically aimed at the Japanese fan who isn't necessarily acquainted with the situation. It both attempts to explain how cons typically do things around here and how so much of the con you see today is the result of a larger shift in the demographic and in its interests. This is a shift away from anime, as anybody who's been going to cons for the last few years can tell you. The business is in the trash, but tens of thousands of people show up at the cons. And then, like Scott Green was saying, you can only get 20 people in a room to listen to well-known fan commentators talk about one of the most important figures in the history of the medium. Maybe a US company could make money funding a low-budget animated version of Colony Drop "favorite" Dramacon. (Volume 2 only, please: that's the best part.)

May 09, 2010

For those of you who don't know, Arcadia is perhaps the only magazine running that's dedicated to arcade videogames. I like the magazine enough to buy it at outrageous Japanese import prices (double cover price on a Japanese mag is not pretty) every few months. Like its mainstream cousin Famitsu, a lot of the mag's content consists of glorified press release fluff and a large, regular advertorial section where "NAMCO SPIRITS" and so on specifically court arcade-goers. However, the fact that these are Japanese arcade games makes the whole thing fundamentally different for a couple of reasons.

First, any given videogame you see in Arcadia is something you will probably never actually play in your life, unless you're willing to get on a plane to do it. (This is probably going to happen to me at some point. Heeelp.) This issue's cover story is indeed Quiz Magic Academy, a popular quiz game you have almost certainly never played or heard of. Second, arcades, all but dead in the rest of the world, are niche-- too niche, really-- which means that the content of Arcadia is aimed firmly at the hardcore arcade devotee. The mag runs Tougeki, one of the biggest events in fighting games (Only Evo is on the same level!), for example.

Regular features include high score listings for anything and everything (Warriors of Fate is in there this month), retro game reviews (Legend of Valkyrie), strategy columns written by winning tourney players (another Daigo Umehara interview this month), page upon page of fan art, and heavy technical info like frame data for fighting games. Who else runs this kind of thing? Arcadia is really a delight.

But you know what I really love? The Arcadia DVD. Tell these people to fill 90 minutes, and they will give you some stuff you won't see anywhere else, ever again. Since I started buying Arcadia, I try not to miss the DVD issues, ever. I've even dug around Japanese P2P looking for rips of the really old discs, and found amazing stuff like this feature, in which Japanese tourney players unsuccessfully take on the meanest, cheapest fighting game bosses of all time.

The big feature this month is a guy doing a perfect run of 1994's arcade shooter Darius Gaiden, barely justified by the fact that the PSP Darius Burst revival just came out. This is no tool-assisted BS: there are guys doing live commentary as our hero destroys the game. Of course, there isn't any live drama going on, and there's never any doubt whatsoever that this guy will beat the game. These are not the movements of someone just playing the game: they're the result of this guy's incredible 100% memorization of everything that happens in Darius Gaiden. Every move is fine-tuned to pull the maximum amount of points out of this game, including several points where he just waits around for the boss to do something that gives him a tiny amount of points, making boss fights unbearably dragged out. Unfortunately this is a direct feed from the game and nothing more: we never get to see or hear this fish-blasting Tommy or the environment he and the announcers are in.

The feature I liked the most was the SNK 20th anniversary "celebration". Here's how the Neo-Geo release schedule worked. SNK didn't have many developers who wanted to work on their platform, so it shouldered almost all of the responsibility of keeping the arcade system (which housed one to six games in the same cabinet) fresh by releasing new titles. This meant that turnaround on games was obscenely fast (for a long stretch, the flagship King of Fighters series had a new title released every year), and this meant that a lot of Neo-Geo titles were incomplete messes that weren't tested nearly enough before release; this tradition sadly carried on to KOFXII.

This video is 20 minutes long and is split into 77 clips, most of which exhibit some arcane and utterly crazy glitch. I'm not sure what's supposed to be happening in some of them, and I'm even less sure how anybody figured out the kind of glitches we see here. Including and moving beyond the simple 100% damage combo, we have moves that destroy the graphics, turn characters into other characters, combo into suicide, and other bizarre effects. You'd never find any of this stuff if you weren't looking for it, but these already-broken games have been pile-driven into the ground. A few other clips just play the openings and endings of a few of the lower-grade Neo titles like Ninja Commando and Ninja Combat. They speak for themselves.

Continuing on the SNK tip, we have some match footage from King of Fighters SkyStage, which is being developed by Raiden IV developer (and former Seibu staff) MOSS. I'm kind of puzzled that nobody has reported on this, but apparently SkyStage has a two-player versus mode! How does this even work? The video sure as hell doesn't offer any clues: I can see that two players are playing the same level at the same time, but how they're hitting each other and even when they die is a total mystery. It's actually made me somewhat interested in SkyStage, for which I was on the "leave" side of "take or leave" since its announcement.

Finally, there's an interview with various champions from Tougeki '09, 20 minutes of tourney footage of King of Fighters 2002 Ultimate Match, and a few promo videos. I'm really left hurting by the preview video of Senkou no Ronde DUO, because I know the complete failure of the first game in the West means I will never, ever play this fantastic-looking hybrid of the 2D shooter and Virtual-On's arena combat. Unless Aksys or somebody gets it, anyway. HEY, AKSYS, PICK THIS GAME UP.

May 07, 2010

Alright, I'm going to do another one of these. There are better tutors
than me, especially out on Youtube, but I've been taking notes all the
same. Ibuki's terribly complicated, and I've figured out quite a bit
fumbling around on my own. We might have a longer post than last time,
if that's possible.

May 06, 2010

I was thinking about this as I worked on the (still!) ongoing Spring '10 article series over at Colony Drop. Once again I'm inspired by a lousy anime: in this case it was the insufferable Mayoi Neko Overrun. The protagonist has no personality and the people around him are personality types, not human beings. The best friend was the one who actually caught my interest: he's an otaku type done as lazily as I've ever seen. He just pops into scenes and usually says something like this.

This is the only thing this character does. His machine-brain has one setting (as opposed to the girls' two or three and the hero's zen non-setting), and it's "spit out otaku catchphrases over and over again". He's just like all the other one-note character types we see in anime all the time. His designated type is "otaku", and like the other codified moe objects in this show, he writes himself. When I watched him blather, I thought to myself "The mighty have fallen and this guy's arrived".

The thinly-veiled nerd personalities of the creators have been popping up in anime for years. People draw on their lives: that's not too weird. If Char is the Gundam character all we otaku want to be, Amuro's certainly the guy we actually are. It's not like otaku have just recently become fond of meta-humor, either: it's been almost twenty years (oh my God) since Otaku no Video.

Offhand, I'm thinking of Shinji's old buddy Kensuke from Evangelion as a good character who's also an otaku. Look at this dude. He's otaku to the core, but you don't know that because he constantly talks about the stuff he's into or spits out names repeatedly for maximum Uncle Yo-style audience impact. You know it because among other things, he's a teenage boy who likes to go put on a military uniform, camp out in a field and play soldier by himself. He's a total dork. The scene where he wages his play campaign is about a minute long in total. It is not the whole of his being.

I'm also thinking about Walker and Erika, the Durarara!! characters who must be explicitly labeled as "otaku characters". Dengeki light novels really are the entirety of these two's being. I realize it might be early to say this, but we're halfway through the show. The major players have been fleshed out, but we don't know a lot about the supporting cast and we don't know a thing about these two except for the fact that I could replace every word out of their mouths with "BUY DENGEKI PRODUCTS". They're apparently fond of torture, which was a legitimate surprise, but even then they get all of their methods out of... Dengeki light novels. Maybe they're just there as product placement?

I don't care much for these two thus far in the show, but they don't immediately ring false to me like the guy in Overrun. I've met all kinds of otaku of varying degrees of sanity and social ability, I've known people who can simply get carried away (including myself in this group), and I've known people who are literally incapable of discussing anything else in the world but their area of interest. Walker and Erika are annoying, but they feel real to me. Otaku can be annoying, after all.

Maybe it was post-Genshiken. (Remind me to make that "meta is murder" post about how the Kujibiki Unbalance joke went too far and killed itself in a blazing plane crash.) More likely it was post-Densha Otoko. (Look forward to a Densha Otoko hit piece, coming soon to Colony Drop.) There probably isn't a specific entity to shoulder the blame, but somewhere along the line otaku took a detour while looking at themselves in the mirror and stuck their heads up their asses instead. This already niche medium keeps getting narrower and narrower: perhaps the otaku character is just a symptom of the larger issues facing the industry.

Look at some recent megahits: Haruhi's about some very otaku-like personalities, and stuff like Lucky Star and Hayate no Gotoku (though that isn't quite a megahit) does Family Guy gags for otaku. Hell, all Kyoto Animation does anymore is niche-targeted otaku-only kind of stuff, and that's what it takes to be the top of the anime industry right now.

(Did you hear about K-On!! singles making the top two spots of the Oricon charts, by the way? This doesn't put otaku in the mainstream to me so much as it says that otaku are the only people in the world willing to pay Japanese CD prices.)

Self-referential otaku gags used to make me chuckle back at Excel Saga, and that show didn't do much but spoof genres. But now the question has become "Hey, what anime comedy isn't doing otaku meta-humor?" It's just one of the bits. There isn't even a real joke or an attempt at commentary at the core of it anymore. Otaku jokes are now toothless. I don't even hear the jokes anymore, only the repeated clunk of a shovel whacking a dead horse over and over again.

In the last few years, more than one lazy light novel-- and I believe the light novel has supplanted the porn game as the premiere source of bad ideas for low-grade anime-- has directly taken the otaku type and pasted it onto the Anime Bullshit Combination Meal Menu along with "yandere", "sister complex", "cat ears" and their ilk. This leads us to where we are today: watching Mayoi Neko Overrun (don't do this). When I saw that piece of shit otaku character-- this brown paper bag with the word "otaku" written on it-- I felt like the trend had hit rock bottom and the whole phenomenon had finally swallowed itself entirely. What do you guys think? Menace or ultra-menace?

May 05, 2010

Fact: I've been playing entirely too much Super Street Fighter IV. When I
first got the game I figured I would play one character for a day or
two, then work on another, and so on. I'm doing this because I tend to
get stuck on one character from the start, never really learning how the
rest work. I figure this trend is bad for my play in general, so in
this game I'll experiment with the giant roster. If I don't get too
caught up with the game, I'd like to do little tip posts for characters.
That's what this is about. I've gotten really used to Juri lately. I'm
writing this for people who are already somewhat acquainted with SSF4:
if you aren't you're probably not going to get a lot out of it.

May 04, 2010

My bad anime dreams are coming true one after the other. First someone finds the Prince of Tennis fandub, now the ADTRW gang have resumed fansubbing School City Valanoir, one of Japanese animation's shoddiest productions. Now we (including the fansubbers: I had to let them know once I figured it out) were all under the impression that these two episodes were all that existed of School City Valanoir, on account of this being an OVA series on two DVDs. The truth is sweeter: the second "episode" released is actually only the first half of the first episode. Each episode is actually an hour long.

Why on earth they would make such a terrible, half-assed piece of work twice as long as they needed to is completely beyond me, but there it is. I ran what I believed was the second episode back at I-Con: it was in fact the second half of the second episode. This is what happens when your raw source is Nicovideo. If you want to see the show unsubbed and you have a Nicovideo account, the whole thing comes up at the very end of this search.

As badly produced as the first bit of Valanoir is, you can see the production values steadily dipping as the show goes on. From this point on the entire show abandons what little animation it employed in the first place, opting to just cut back between four or five stills for five minutes at a time. It actually gets a tiny bit worse after this episode. The first episode ends on a stupid, stupid cliffhanger and is followed by an ad for the game, a standard PS2 adventure title whose production values still exceed the anime by a mile. I can't imagine who the hell would run out to the store after being robbed of $60 by these people.

The subtitles now have even more wrong-on-purpose gags, and I hear that Ko was drunk again. There's even a gag from one of the IRC channels we hang out on! Only twenty guys will even know what that shit is about! Good job, Ko. Stay drunk. Note that there are also two subtitle tracks. I will leave the second track's secrets for you to discover.

Man, the anime industry might be in the shitter, but things are sure coming up Dave where things like this are concerned. I feel like I can't not win! At this rate they'll make MD Geist III and I'll be able to quit otaku with a clear conscience.